Gong xi fa cai!

The observance of the New Year (Xin Nian) typically several days, but the New Year season lasts from the middle of the previous years’ final month to the middle of the first month in the new year.

In the system of reckoning time, years are named in cycles of sixty years. The name of the year repeats every sixty years, therefore.

2010 is the 11th year in the 60 year cycle and is called gengyin. It is the year 4707… year of the Tiger.

An upside down ("dao") character – "Spring"

To prepare for the New Year, people give their houses thorough cleaning so as to symbolically sweeping misfortune or bad luck and make room for incoming good fortune that they want to arrive.

Doors and windows are often painted and decorated with paper cutouts depicting happiness, wealth and longevity. Characters on red paper are placed upside down on doors, because the Chinese word for "upside down" – "dao" – is like the word for "arrive", so, if the character for "spring" is put up upside down, that means that ‘spring is arriving". The same for "good fortune" etc.

Gongxi facai!

New Year is a time for family gatherings.

Among the foods that are eaten are jiaozi – a boiled dumpling, literally meaning "sleep together and have sons", the meaning of which is apparent.

Fish is also eaten because the Chinese word for "fish" sounds the same as that for "abundance".

One also eats a seaweed called fat choi, a word sounding "prosperity". Noodles symbolize a long life.

On New Year’s Eve you are to leave all the lights on in your house tonight, by the way. I hear that is very good luck – particularly for the electric company. In the morning children get hong bao which are red envelopes with some money. They will customarily say "Where’s the red envelope?!?" until you cough it up. Therefore, I will put my donation button on this post!

People visit their neighbors to greet each other. You might think about doing that, since that can also be a work of mercy.

People give mandarin oranges as a token of good will and good fortune.

I grudgingly accept your “Happy Chinese New Year” :) Although no fan of the repressive Maos in power, I’m actually very fond of Chinese culture (especially food–I recently had the great ‘fortune’ to be taken to the best Chinese food I’ve ever had by a writer friend of mine in Los Angeles, the place dates to the second World War.)

I’m in Portland, and they have an amazing Chinese Garden here, with native Chinese plants (which you can no longer import.) The Chinese and Japanese have a preternatural ability to create amazing garden spaces. I also love some of their art:

The Lunar New Year is also bringing the local Church a lesson on inculturation.

Since Ash Wednesday this year falls on the fourth day of the Lunar New Year (Feb. 17), the Church of Hong Kong dispensed the faithful from fasting and abstinence that day. However, they are obliged to choose some other suitable forms of penance or perform some works of charity, in keeping with the penitential spirit of the season of Lent.

Taking into account the Lunar New Year festivities, the rite of the giving of ashes in Hong Kong may also be postponed to Feb. 24 (during Mass) or Feb. 26 (during Stations of the Cross).

Not to dampen our Chinese New Year or anything like that, but I would like to call everybody’s attention with a Filipino bishop who said “God is present in other religion and culture so the belief in Feng Shui, Astrology, and praying at Buddhist temples should be perceived as instruments that all draws us closer to God.”

Although today is Gongxi facai, or the Chinese New Year; and I swear a Chinese woman almost ran me over. I don’t know if it’s God or the devil playing meaningful jokes like this on me, but the lady was so sorrowful that I couldn’t get mad at her. I think it’s questionable if women should be allowed to drive at all, but definitely, absolutely no Chinese woman should be licensed to drive….

(btw: my wife is a better driver than I am, so I was kidding about the last part, although it is true an ethnic Chinese woman almost killed me today, inadvertently.)

Thanks for the info, I’ve always wondered about the upside down character. Slightly off-topic, but still on things Chinese: I’ve been having an ailment treated by acupuncture, and it is working. However, a friend of mine was aghast, saying that it is incompatible with Christianity? Is this so, and if so, how?

Happy New Year. I guess we could call it “Chinese New Year”, but then why don’t we start calling the “other” new years Egyptian or Mayan? My folks call it Tet, but I think it’d be best to call it in general lunar new year if anything.

“Slightly off-topic, but still on things Chinese: I’ve been having an ailment treated by acupuncture, and it is working. However, a friend of mine was aghast, saying that it is incompatible with Christianity? Is this so, and if so, how?

Thanks for a splendid site!
Comment by Sean og”

Not to hijack Fr.’s post, but I practice acupuncture so I would be very hard to convince that acupuncture is incompatible with our Holy Faith. Science is discovering more and more the physiologic mechanisms of how this ancient healing technique works.

“The Lunar New Year is also bringing the local Church a lesson on inculturation.

Since Ash Wednesday this year falls on the fourth day of the Lunar New Year (Feb. 17), the Church of Hong Kong dispensed the faithful from fasting and abstinence that day. However, they are obliged to choose some other suitable forms of penance or perform some works of charity, in keeping with the penitential spirit of the season of Lent.”

I don’t see how this is different than giving a dispensation to eat “corned beef and cabbage” when St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday during Lent.

Amazingly my sister just sent my son one of these envelopes. Something she’s had in a box of her stuff for 35 years from when she went to Malaysia. He got $2 :-)

Starting to think about BACK TO SCHOOL items? Even text books? When you shop…

... through Amazon, please, come here first? Enter Amazon through my search box. I'll then get a small percentage of everything you buy. (Pssst - Can't see the search box? Turn off your "ad-blocker" for this site!)

Search Fr. Z’s Blog

Search for:

"In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. ... If all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are obliged to do so in a particular way, in keeping with their responsibility as politicians." CDF 2003 and HERE

Support them with prayer and fasting.

CLICK and say your Daily Offering!

Leave Voice Mail for Fr. Z

Nota bene: I do not answer these numbers or this Skype address. You won't get me "live". I check for messages regularly.

WDTPRS

020 8133 4535

651-447-6265

Let us pray…

Grant unto thy Church, we beseech
Thee, O merciful God, that She, being
gathered together by the Holy Ghost, may
be in no wise troubled by attack from her
foes.
O God, who by sin art offended and by
penance pacified, mercifully regard the
prayers of Thy people making supplication
unto Thee,and turn away the scourges of
Thine anger which we deserve for our sins.
Almighty and Everlasting God, in
whose Hand are the power and the
government of every realm: look down upon
and help the Christian people that the heathen
nations who trust in the fierceness of their
own might may be crushed by the power of
thine Arm. Through our Lord Jesus Christ,
Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee
in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world
without end. R. Amen.

Yes, Fr. Z is taking ads…

... and there will be nearly 1,000,000 page loads this month.

Traditional Catholic? Are you single? Don’t want to be? CLICK!

Help Monks in Wyoming, Fr. Z, and get great coffee too!

And they have tea too!

Because you don’t know when you are going to need to move fast or get along without the supermarket…

Great gift for newly ordained priests. Folding altar card set for the Traditional Latin Mass.

And check out the stunning FULL SIZE altar cards HERE. I have a set on my altar.

New Gregorian Chant CD by the Benedictines of Norcia!

Wyoming Catholic College!

A great place in Rome…

Identity theft is a serious problem that you do NOT want to have. I use Lifelock.

And for your cybersecurity…

My wish lists

Main Wishlist Kindle WishlistAudio WishlistHam Radio ListNEW

Food For Thought

“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

A bit more food for thought…

“Only one sin is nowadays severely punished: the attentive observance of the traditions of our Fathers. For that reason the good ones are thrown out of their places and brought to the desert.”

For your consideration…

"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

More food for thought:

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Check out the Cardinal Newman Society feed!

Be a “Zed-Head”!

Fr. Z’s stuff is everywhere

More food for thought…

"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."

- Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176

Even More Food For Thought

"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests."

To set up a recurring, monthly donation (even a small one) go to the bottom of this blog and look for the drop down menu! Some donations also come through Chase/Manhattan (if you don't like PayPal).

I remember benefactors in my prayers and periodically say Mass for your intention.

Additional Food For Thought

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Fathers, you don’t know who might show up! It could be a “big fish” of one sort or other…

What people say…

"Father John Zuhlsdorf is a crank"
"Father Zuhlsdorf drives me crazy"
"the hate-filled Father John Zuhlsford" [sic]
"Father John Zuhlsdorf, the right wing priest who has a penchant for referring to NCR as the 'fishwrap'"

Help the Sisters. They have a building project. Get great soap (gifts, etc.) while helping REAL nuns!

Food For Thought

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Archives

ENTRY CALENDAR

Do you use my blog often? Is it helpful to you?

If so, please consider subscribing to send a monthly donation. That way I have steady income I can plan on, and you wind up regularly on my list of benefactors for whom I pray and for whom I periodically say Holy Mass.